I started playing around with P6 some more and this is the result. There are 2 lights in the scene... 1 is set up as a IBL (with Ambient Occlusion set), but that type of lighting tends to 'dry out' the skin and doesn't seem to light eyes very well, so the second light is a Point light, just in front, slightly above and slightly left of her. The image used for the IBL was a simple grey-scaled render of another character. In this particular render, it mostly just provides some soft shadowing and occlusion in some areas. Straight P6 render, no postwork. Model is my own, texture by Dru and myself, RealSkinSahder by face_off and hair by Koz (of course ;).

Wow1! Great render! And thanks for the tip on the lighting. Im working on a render that needs to be real and I agree that the IBL dries out the skin. Great tip.

spanky, may I ask....did you load a bump map? it feels like the RealSkinShader is generating "painted on" spots as it does when it can't find a bump map, which is not anywhere near how great it is when driven by a bump map. I like your model's hands. ::::: Opera :::::

Hmmm.. I know that when you run the script it sets the bump map value to like 0.000097 - I usually go in and set that back to 0.0002, but now that you mention it, I ran the script again right before the render and forgot to do that, so there's extremely minimal bump-mapping (combined with the minimal granite displacement mapping) in this image. On the lights... Poser crashed not long after this render, so I can't check it, but I think I ended up with the IBL light set to like 65% and the Point light set to about 50%.

...the 'apinted on spots' (ie. freckles) is something I wanted, btw.

but I mean did you attach an actual graphics file like bump.jpg to the bump node? If you don't do that, in the earlier version of the Shader the script will creat painted on spots. In later versions it will take the texture map and attempt to create bump effect from it. In my experience, using an actual bump.jpg works best...it can create all the spots you want, but it also lends great depth to them, making them look more sub surface. ::::: Opera :::::

Thanks for the tip about the lighting, I just got to play with 6 for the first time last night and I liked my first render, but she does look a bit dried out.

I have not yet created a separate bumpmap for this model... but/so I use the texture map as a bumpmap in non-closeup renders like this. So the answer is yes.. I did have an image attached to the bumpmap node.

IBL affects diffuse only, so there's no specularity included. If you want to add just specularity without any other changes to the light, use one or two spec only lights to get wet highlights.

Ahh.. thanks for the info.. that makes sense.

Good to know, was wondering why all my IBL experiments were looking like painted plaster models (:P)

Here's another with Stephy Petite... the Ambient Occlusion is most apparent around her armpits and base of her butt. It's subtle, but really adds to the image, I think. This image also uses 2 lights - basically in the same place. One set as IBL (in this case, also casting Depth Map shadows) and another (infinite this time) without shadows to add some specular.

Spanki it looks fantastic!! TOP work! as for the :dirty: shadows you can controle it in the Ambient Occlusion Strength ( Scene AO Options) to get the best effect you want... the standard p6 lights setting was not really impressed me.. Cath

Spanki beautiful work - Question: by greyscale render do you mean you rendered a character in only gery's or converted a render to greyscale in say photoshop???

Thanks Cath - I was inspired to start playing with it by your threads! ;). So far, I haven't adjusted the oclusion strength much, but will play around with that next. Cebo, converted to grey-scale (see image above). Note that: 1. I wasn't really trying to light the character by the scene as much as just trying to achieve a relatively painless 'global' type lighting, so I just randomly picked an image with some greyscale variations. 2. The IBL light is only contributing half of the light in these images, so it's affects are dampened (or washed out to some extent by the second light). 3. Just for kicks, I did this second render (character on right) with a blue-tinted image source to see what affect it had (also note that the character on the left (from previous render) was cut-n-pasted on top of this render for comparison, it was not rendered in the same scene).

Spanki - incredible results you are getting! The issue with script based fake sss effects with IBL is an interesting one, since the IBL file may create a strong lightsource out to the right, but the main scene light for the script may be in front of the character - impacting the fake sss. From my limited testing to date, it seems that for human portraits, your system of a single strong light (used as the main scene light for the script) together with secondary light coming from IBL gives the best results. And with IBL, the fake sss can probably be turned down a little. Maybe in the future the RSS/HyperReal scripts could analyse the IBL file and determine where the strongest souce of light is coming from, and add the fake sss from that direction. Much more experimentation required...